In an eyebrow-raising new paper, neuroscientists report that they had participants wear a ball gag while watching images of people in pain. The lucky participants in this neuro-bondage were all female BDSM submissives, and their brain activity in response to the painful pictures was recorded with EEG. Here's the article: Embodiment and Humiliation Moderation of Neural Responses to Others' Suffering in Female Submissive BDSM Practitioners And here's some of the stimuli (I assume they we ...read more

As luck would have it, Mars will remain engulfed in a colossal dust storm as it reaches opposition on July 27. The viewing conditions might be abysmal, but astronomers can at least take solace in a long-awaited Martian mystery being solved — where all of this dust is coming from. New research published in the journal Nature Communications revealed that the massive amounts of dust are tied to Mars’ Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF), the ...read more

Biting your tongue or cheek when chewing can ruin a tasty meal. But thankfully, mouth wounds heal up fast — faster than cuts on skin — and now scientists know why. According to new research published today in Science Translational Medicine, mouths are primed for healing. The find could help researchers transfer the mouth’s curative superpowers to make skin lesions heal faster too. Paper cuts, scraped knees and similar skin wounds take ab ...read more

Just imagine what you could do with a third arm. You could sip coffee and type an email. You could scratch your nose and play Call of Duty. You could solve the Rubik’s cube and conduct a symphony. You could play Ping-Pong and knit a sweater. Clearly, we could all use a third arm. Fortunately, giving us a hand with a third arm might be a promise science can deliver on, like, soon. That’s because engineers at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Instit ...read more

Astronomers have discovered a large underground lake of liquid water lurking just below the surface of Mars. The find could end a more than century-long debate over whether or not the Red Planet still has liquid water. The newfound lake stretches some 12 miles from end-to-end, and was discovered using a radar instrument called MARSIS on board the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, which first reached Mars nearly 15 years ago. The results were published Wednesday ...read more

One thing that many people in the Pacific Northwest are holding their breath for is "The Big One" -- the next recurrence of a massive earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction zone. This earthquake could be greater than a magnitude 8 and cause immense damage to cities like Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. This hypothetical earthquake could even potentially triggering a tsunami that will cross the Pacific Ocean just like a similar temblor in 1700 did when waves washed ashore in Japan. It is a ser ...read more

If you're a fan of muscley men, listen up: those guns might come at the cost of a man's fertility. In this study (published in the journal Animal Behavior, because we ain't nothin' but mammals), the researchers report that physical strength in men, while seen as attractive by women, is also associated with "lower ejaculate quality." Boxer shorts, anyone? Perceived physical strength in men is attractive to women but may come at a cost to ejaculate quality "Studies of sexual selectio ...read more

To learn more from fossils they find in nature, paleontologists are trying to create their own. For decades, paleontologists have been experimenting with heat, pressure, and other factors to mimic nature’s ability to preserve the bodies of living things as fossils. Trying to copy fossilization in a laboratory would allow paleontologists to better understand the process and learn more about the history of life on our planet from the fossils they find. In a study published i ...read more

In October 1957, a basketball-sized metallic sphere began circling Earth, transmitting a beacon from above. For many, the launch of Sputnik 1 heralded in the Space Age. But lost often in the story of Sputnik, the Space Age, and the Space Race is that Sputnik wasn’t the first spaceflight, and that the first image of Earth from space didn’t come in the 1960s, but the 1940s. The actual first spaceflight is a matter of debate. The Air Force defines space as ...read more

A mind-altering parasite that can make rats suicidally attracted to cat pee may also make people more likely to start a new business, according to new findings. The scientists say that their results reveal how parasites could help shape the global economy. The parasite Toxoplasma gondii infects more than 2 billion people — that is, more than a quarter of the world population. The protozoans can live in many warm-blooded creatures, where they reproducing asexually, but they ul ...read more